


A tale of a King and a Knight: The forever men

by mountland



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-10
Updated: 2011-01-10
Packaged: 2020-10-30 04:03:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20808215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mountland/pseuds/mountland
Summary: "Today’s story is about the cheating of death, a tale of love, pain, and redemption. It is about the choices the gods placed upon two humans and their decision to become either gods or devils.”





	A tale of a King and a Knight: The forever men

**Author's Note:**

> Bringing over my old fics from livejournal - this was originally posted 10th Jan, 2011

Placing her clown next to a chalk board, she sat down facing her captive audience. She rested a large book of fables from cultures long forgotten by time on her crossed legs and flicked through to a page marked with a white sock and started to read.

“Today’s story is about the cheating of death, a tale of love, pain, and redemption. It is about the choices the gods placed upon two humans and their decision to become either gods or devils.”

\- - -

Once upon a time in the noble city of Man-Chased-Her on the planet Urrth, there lived a man. He was a king amongst his men, a leader clothed in armour made of camel. Yet he was more than that; he was an anchor in time and space that attracted the flim-flam of time, those who were washed ashore to settle in his wake, the living dead whose lost souls he collected. The King would take each fallen soldier and show them the fight before sending them on their way with a promise of a drink and a nod of gratitude.

But one such piece of drift wood was different from the others, a wordsmith whose sword was his tongue and doctrine his shield. Beauty, pride and courage -- all were his given by the stars, but a price had to be paid: his heart, a cold useless organ, whose purpose was long since forgot.

The King whose voice echoed the storms of ages raging in the nebular of space, with the fire of the center of the universe burning through his every pore; rumbling out its power. He had the heart of a lion going into battle, yet his heart had also long since forgotten how to roar, as mute and as forgotten as the wordsmith’s icy organ. 

Their paths became intertwined through the vulgarities of the tide of time, each one another’s equal; one the bringer of Order, the other Chaos’s advocate. Chaos and destruction flew around them, sparks flying at every touch. The heat of rage, and fire, and of passion warmed their hearts and broke the hold ice and stone had over them. Pulling each other up, they flew into danger on the thrill of Chaos and wings of life. Small threads weaving together old wounds and tying them, uniting them, soon to become eternally bound together.

They were to become loved and feared in equal amounts; princes of the universe, two kings. A wordsmith turned knight and a warrior; both fighters of noble heart.

During the dark hours children will whisper about the King and the Knight, under the covers, books lit by stolen light. Parents will retell the tales, to teach right from wrong, to threaten disobedient young. Rivals will argue over who lays claim to their support. The fighters and protectors to the first, defenders and law abiders to the second; both sides will argue in who’s image and honour they are born and killed; both and neither in the end. But first for that to come into play, their story must start and no story starts in happiness.

Our heroes’ unhappiness starts in inequality. The Gods smiled upon the King. He was a protector of those lost to time, honoured with the position nature had granted him: a Lord of Time. The privilege of a Time Lord is mastery over death, or at least the ability to cheat the grim reaper. But the Gods did not extend this gift to his deputy. They were no longer two giants, two champions, two lovers, but one mortal and one immortal. Only one could spend the rest of his life together with his beloved; the other cursed to walk hand-in-hand with loneliness. The job of collecting his Knight’s soul and seeing it on to the next world resting heavy on the King’s double hearts; the physical symbol of their difference.

The Knight had finally learnt the importance of Chaos but the King turned to Order. 

“Death is Order. Life ought to be Chaos, how else do you know you are alive if you cannot feel? Only Chaos brings feeling,” his deputy argued but the King stood firm. Chaos was danger and he could already feel the traveller’s life blood trickling through his grasp, ebbing away before him. The Knight just laughed, his face as bright as the sun carrying on his merry dance, dragging the king in his wake.

But it could not be forever, for all Urrthly beings must come and pass and all too soon for the King because the Knight was swept away, his dance cut short.

If all had been Order he should have been carried to the afterlife in the loving arms of the King of death himself but Chaos will always reign and our hero could not bear to part forever. The traveller was one spirit with whom he could not bare to bid farewell so he left the man a ghost. Neither here nor there, neither dead nor alive, he was a shadow forever knocking at the back of your mind, seen out the corner of your eye. He was forever there, and never there: forever separated.

But Rassilon’s Lords are not the only powers at play here, for there are many strange and magical forces in the universe and the stars looked down at the King as he faded, as his heart and soul grew dark and cold once again. He was wounded in his heart, by pain and by grief, and he’d none to cure him.

They watched him, oft consumed by hatred and by rage at the loss of the wordsmith they themselves had plucked from time to deliver unto him. They gave him another, pulled from the arms of her babe and left her in his. Yet she could not soothe his ills and the King sent her on in the age-old fashion; with a promise of a drink and a nod of gratitude.

Love is the one force that can never be tamed or controlled not even by the Gods, but they can control time. So the Stars proposed a deal to the Knight. The forever-king could never love again while his heart belonged to him: a Knight clothed in black.

They could not make him love another but they could rewrite the story so that his heart was free again. If their two paths had never crossed then his heart would never break. But every deal has a catch, and this was no exclusion. For the Knight it was the story of his life - his heart was the price and they required his blood to seal the pact.

The Knight saw his King; so cold and alone. If they were to be separated forever, then at least only one would mourn the distance. The Knight made his choice. He chose to unwind his path, leaving himself cold and alone on a kingdom that was once, but never truly, his and mourning the loss of a king whose path he had never crossed, and never would.

However, the story does not end here for there is a forgotten law, older than the universe itself, which says one of pure of heart who sacrifices himself for those whom he loves will ne’er die.

Upon sealing the deal the Stars saw how bright the heart of the Knight -who was once nothing but a wordsmith- had become. This heart’s love for the King shone brighter than them in the sky for it was prepared to break itself to heal its love’s. Shining so bright and pure, the universe itself could not help but see. For this, as the law prescribes, the reward is life and so the universe breathed its ancient magic in to him, freeing him from his moral turmoil; finally free to join his beloved in an eternal dance.

And they still dance now, the Forever Men; The Guv and his Sam, across the stars in eternity. If you look closely up into the night sky, if you are one of the lost to be, you can see them smiling back at you; smiling at last, forever and a day.


End file.
